Len Lye Movies

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using...

Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.

Rainbow Dance is a 1936 British animated film released by the GPO Film Unit. This is Lye's second film. It uses the Gasparcolor process.

A 1941 Ministry of Information propaganda film set to the tune of The Lambeth Walk, a popular song from the musical Me and My Girl.

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to...

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of...

A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron. The writer Anaïs Nin...

Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime...

A tribute to the cameramen of the newsreel companies and the service film units, in the form of a compilation of film of the cameramen themselves,...

This film documents the major directions in modern American art during the first seven years of the 1960s. The keynote is that the artist has...

Intended as a publicity film for Chrysler, Rhythm uses rapid editing to speed up the assembly of a car, synchronizing it to African drum music. The...

Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends...

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into...

BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness...

Len Lye made this experiment in animating poetry circa 1953 utilising a clip of Sir John Gielgud reciting a passage from The Tempest.

While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor.

This riot of color was a showcase for Lye’s hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the...

Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked...

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their...